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7 thoughts on “There Is No Argument”

Destructive to the ecology; waste of money; ugly; not a practical deterrent.

To create sense of nation state you do not have to emphasize fear of external enemy and all of this, really. Actual teaching of US history, actual visiting of US places, but more than that actually having institutions that are the peoples’. This is difficult now since what we all have in common seems to be the malls, period, but some actual civic life would help.

Nobody is planning to stand and stare at it, so the aesthetic aspect is not important.

As for the teaching of history, the Howard-Zinnish version that’s in vogue right now won’t help. Neither will toppling of statues, denunciations of Columbus, or the endless discussions of how Washington was an evildoer and Thomas Jefferson was a rapist. There’s no national unity or pride that will come out of a sense of guilt. But that’s all that is allowed to exist anymore.

Then it’s not helpful to nation-building, so we can cross it off the list. What’s left? No sense of shared pride, no shared symbols, no clear borders, no sense of shared destiny, no shared language, no shared religion. What is left to build a nation-state?